Reports of Nancy Pelosi's Knowledge of Waterboarding Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

So, a reconstructed document that is contradicted by reality is the basis for this charge against Pelosi. While it’s possible that she was briefed on waterboarding at that meeting, there’s no evidence to think so, and there is clearly some evidence to suggest that the CIA’s version of events is not accurate.

Color me surprised.

If the Cons want to drag Dems into their mud, they’ll have to do better. I don’t care if torture investigations rope a few dirty Dems – crooks are crooks. But mixing up some mud and throwing it on someone does not a fellow conspirator in war crimes make.

So that’s one thing Jello Jay is trying to expose with his narrative: in addition to neglecting to inform Congress when the CIA got into the torture business, the Bush Administration basically responded to Congressional reminders about our Constitution by–first–ignoring their request for 10 months, and then, after that wait, stacking ridiculous argument on top of ridiculous argument to argue that the US can engage in whatever cruelty it wants so long as it’s not in US jurisdiction (narrowly defined) and so long as it can be claimed to be effective and necessary.

That’s right, my darlings. Sen. “Jello” Jay Rockefeller didn’t passively go along with the eager torturers, tried to enforce some oversight, and got nothing but a giant FUCK YOU from the Bushies for his troubles.

Both Greenwald and Sullivan take the NY Times to task today for their willingness to call torture torture when it’s applied to Americans but not to terrorists suspects. They cite an obituary today of an Air Force pilot who was shot down over China and tortured into making false confessions. It’s eerily like the stories we’ve heard about our own torture regime, and that’s no coincidence. It was, after all, modeled on the Chinese techniques of that era. Indeed, much of what is described sounds like the milder of the torture techniques the Bush administration approved for the CIA.

In any case, they both do an excellent job of exposing the hypocrisy of the Times, which still refuses to call the Bush torture regime by its rightful name, and point out the all the by now familiar similarities between what was done to our servicemen in the past and what we did to terrorists suspects in the last few years.

We tortured. If investigations into that torture reveal a few Dems who should’ve done better, so be it. That’s no reason to let Bushies get away with war crimes.